On the art of shipping

[00:00:00] You're listening to The Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? All right. As promised, today on the first day of March, we're going to be exploring the art of shipping, specifically the art of shipping a large piece of content.

[00:00:29] Or project if you're not doing content. In this case, I have a small course I've been thinking about creating for almost an entire year, and now I've publicly promised its release to a couple of people. So I'm really on the hook for it. And of course, I want it to be done really well. So this month we'll explore a few things:

[00:00:56] One, how to balance finishing something while also creating something of good quality. Two, how to handle the fear of getting started. Three, how to create something and ship when you are afraid of possible success. And four, how to keep creating and shipping when you're afraid of also possible failure.

[00:01:20] These are all core issues we all face when we try to do something new and interesting, especially when those projects are meant for an audience, whether that audience is our family, friends, or people on the internet. This is also why I wanted to reevaluate my goals and set up fresh and more appropriate review or check-in systems for myself before this month got started.

[00:01:44] Regularly checking in with yourself and keeping your goal or mission in front of you is pretty key in accomplishing things, especially very, especially if you lead a busy life with a lot of different things, people and projects that pull at your attention constantly. It also helps you work through your mental blocks when you are consistently checking in in some way.

[00:02:10] It's far too easy to shove your fears and everything that ignites those fears to the back of your mind. Niggling away at your energy, but not actively taking up your attention. It's far too easy to just not deal with it and procrastinate or make excuses. In some ways, I've done that for the last two months, but as you'll know, if you've been listening for the last few days, I've sort of had enough with myself.

[00:02:39] I'm not even kidding. I looked at myself in the mirror and wagged a finger at my reflection and said, "enough," it's time to deal with the mental blocks and ship something I know I want to create, and I know has the potential to be pretty damn awesome. Sometimes you just have to give yourself a stern talking to.

[00:03:01] So shipping, delivering, producing, creating, whatever your preferred term is. Mine is shipping. It's really this weird and complicated process of balancing not only everything you wanna fit into a project, but also finishing at a reasonable time, producing something of good quality that you can stand behind, and also keeping your audience in mind.

[00:03:26] And of course, like with any project scope creep is always an issue, and it's really important to stay focused on the main goal of whatever you're trying to create. So in my case, the way I'm avoiding or hoping to avoid scope creep is that I'm calling my course a crash course. It's a course you should be able to consume fairly quickly in a matter of few hours, spread across a short period of time, no longer than two weeks.

[00:03:53] It also needs to be a deeply practical course because people take crash courses when they're trying to accomplish something, and the faster you can get them from understanding to application, the more valuable your course will feel. I think half the work of shipping is actually the mental game of breaking things up into small, achievable tasks and then getting over your fear so you can just do it.

[00:04:17] So as I work my butt off this month to ship something new and very real, I'll take you through what will undoubtedly be an adventure filled with ups and downs as I battle my own fears and mental blocks that come with not only shipping, but also publicly sharing the process of shipping. So, you know, let's get to it.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.